5

With the exception of these periods of industry lasting ten days, the years I spent
during the production of Zarathustra, and thereafter, were for me years of
unparalleled distress. A man pays dearly for being immortal: to this end he must die
many times over during his life. There is such a thing as what I call the rancour of
greatness: everything great, whether a work or a deed, once it is completed, turns
immediately against its author. The very fact that he is its author makes him weak at
this time. He can no longer endure his deed. He can no longer look it full in the face.
To have something at one's back which one could never have willed, something to
which the knot of human destiny is attached—and to be forced thenceforward to
bear it on one's shoulders! Why, it almost crushes one! The rancour of greatness! A
somewhat different experience is the uncanny silence that reigns about one. Solitude
has seven skins which nothing can penetrate. One goes among men; one greets
friends: but these things are only new deserts, the looks of those one meets no longer
bear a greeting. At the best one encounters a sort of revolt. This feeling of revolt, I
suffered, in varying degrees of intensity, at the hands of almost every one who came
near me; it would seem that nothing inflicts a deeper wound than suddenly to make
one's distance felt. Those noble natures are scarce who[Pg 106] know not how to live
unless they can revere. A third thing is the absurd susceptibility of the skin to small
pin-pricks, a kind of helplessness in the presence of all small things. This seems to
me a necessary outcome of the appalling expenditure of all defensive forces, which
is the first condition of every creative act, of every act which proceeds from the most
intimate, most secret, and most concealed recesses of a man's being. The small
defensive forces are thus, as it were, suspended, and no fresh energy reaches them.
I even think it probable that one does not digest so well, that one is less willing to
move, and that one is much too open to sensations of coldness and suspicion; for, in
a large number of cases, suspicion is merely a blunder in etiology. On one occasion
when I felt like this I became conscious of the proximity of a herd of cows, some
time before I could possibly have seen it with my eyes, simply owing to a return in
me of milder and more humane sentiments: they communicated warmth to me....